The REFEDS Research and Scholarship Entity Category (R&S) has been designed as a simple and scalable way for Identity Providers to release minimal amounts of required personal data to Service Providers serving the Research and Scholarship Community.

As an Entity Category, Services that share the common criteria described in the R&S specification are tagged by federation operators that have briefly audited the Service Providers to ensure they meet certain criteria. Once tagged, Identity Providers can safely release a small set of data to these providers with the knowledge it meets minimal requirements and privacy requirements.

R&S meets the requirements of privacy by design, but also meets the ongoing need to allow personal data to flow in controlled environments to support the needs of users.